1. Technical Field
The present invention pertains to computer systems for navigating a network and searching for information stored within systems residing thereon. In particular, the present invention pertains to a search engine and navigation tool for a network, such as the Internet, that provides search results in accordance with search criteria and/or associated sites.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Current internet search engines have developed various techniques for ranking web sites as to their relevance to a search, usually on the basis of the location and frequency of search terms residing in the site and web site popularity as determined by the quantity of links to a web site. This technique is not necessarily conducive to finding web sites that are closely related to the search terms since wording within the web sites may not be judged properly by a search engine that rates web site relevance by frequency criteria and link quantity.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide network search results in accordance with search criteria and/or sites associated with the search results.
It is another object of the present invention to determine relevancy of network search results based on associations with search result sites.
Yet another object of the present invention is to refine network search results based on associations with user selected sites.
Still another object of the present invention is to combine network search results based on content and/or associations with user selected sites to provide refined search results having enhanced relevancy to a particular topic.
The aforesaid objects are achieved individually and/or in combination, and it is not intended that the present invention be construed as requiring two or more of the objects to be combined unless expressly required by the claims attached hereto.
According to the present invention, an enhanced ranking may be made of the logical grouping of a multitude of network or web sites by correlating the links available on web pages. The correlation of these links can be determined from the number of times two or more of the sites are linked from common web pages. In other words, if two specific web sites are each listed as links by a third-party site, the two sites are somewhat likely to have a common theme, even if they do not directly link to one another. If numerous third-party sites link to both of the two specific sites, the probability of the two specific sites being related becomes greater. For example, even if web pages of two car manufacturers do not link to one another, numerous web pages do link to both manufacturers since the topics on both car manufacturer pages are closely related. In addition, search results may include numerous web sites that are related to each other based upon link analysis. Web sites that have strong relationships and match a search query are more likely to be related to the search than web sites that have few or no related sites within the search results. The relationships and corresponding strengths are used to determine rankings for listing the sites in order of relevancy with the most relevant sites being listed ahead of the lesser relevant sites.
Upon xe2x80x9cspideringxe2x80x9d the Web (e.g., traversing substantially the entire Web by following links between web pages), groupings of web sites can be determined by setting threshold values for sites that are linked by common web sites. The greater the quantity of common links in a grouping and the closer the proximity of the links to one another, the closer the relationship between the grouping of sites. A statistically accurate assumption can be made as to validity of a grouping of sites by setting threshold values for the quantity of common links. The present invention combines the rated index of the content of a web site with the correlation of links to other sites to provide a logical grouping of related sites and enhanced search engine ranking capability. Further, the present invention enhances the results by indicating the closest groupings to the desired topic and iteratively refining the search results.